Ferrell And Square

Proving That Not All Funny People Need To Have Tortured Childhoods, Will Ferrell Channels His White-bread Lunacy Into '70s Anchorman Ron Burgundy.

July 10, 2004|By Sharon Waxman The New York Times

This year Will Ferrell, budding comic superstar, went to the Academy Awards for the first time. Walking down the red carpet with his pregnant wife, Viveca, he heard his name called everywhere: "Will! Will!" came the shouts from the paparazzi. "Will! Over here!" screamed the fans. He turned. He looked. There was no one.

No one but Will Smith, 20 feet behind him.

Is Ferrell a movie star? By all methods of Hollywood accounting, it would seem so. Who could argue with the success of last Christmas' blockbuster, Elf, the multigenerational, $170 million hit in which Ferrell played a 6-foot-3 pixie in tights? Just before that, Old School -- in which he played a misfit college grad -- was a hit in theaters and a bigger hit on DVD, where it raked in $143 million.

In a flash, the gangly, maladroit and extremely polite Ferrell has become the comic lead everyone in Hollywood wants to cast. He's shooting a soccer movie, Kicking and Screaming, has two films awaiting release and one in theaters now, Anchorman, in which he plays the title character, a male chauvinist and TV newscaster named Ron Burgundy.

He will also star with Nicole Kidman in a film version of Bewitched before the end of the year, and has a supporting role in The Producers after that.

But the movie-star label doesn't quite stick, not yet. He's still just fooling around. "I'm at play every time I get to act," he says quietly, seated in his trailer at the end of a day's shooting. "That never leaves me. It comes through more in the characters with the eternal optimism. Whether it's joy, or cockiness, it's fun to play attitude to the nth degree."

Ferrell wears a red Fred Perry jogging suit -- making him resemble a character out of The Royal Tenenbaums -- and is probably beyond exhausted. It's now 6:30 p.m.; he woke up at 4:30 a.m. for an early call, a photo shoot; and he has a baby at home, named Magnus (born a week after the Oscars), who doesn't respect early call times.

In movie forays and through seven years of virtuoso work on Saturday Night Live, with his renditions of President Bush and Craig the Spartan cheerleader, Ferrell has refined a fresh kind of funny. A clean-cut, Orange County, pollution-free, suburban kind of funny.

"I don't get depressed," he says (so many comics do). "I've always landed with my feet on the ground. I don't get that down. Stuff rolls off my back, mostly."

The 36-year-old Ferrell is constantly embracing his inner Candide, whether as the elf in Manhattan greeting the surliest passers-by with a grin or as the swinging single guy at the Roxbury club enduring humiliation from random females with no evident effect on his demeanor.

Ferrell's humor is post-ironic, almost frighteningly well-adjusted. His characters are never mean, and the laughs are usually at his own expense. Even in a movie like Anchorman, which plays more like a not-ready-for-prime-time sketch than a full-fledged feature, his bumbling chauvinism has an indelible charm.

Which is not to say that everybody gets it. When he and his friend Adam McKay pitched the idea for Anchorman at DreamWorks, Ferrell turned up in a giant foam cowboy hat, facing the DreamWorks production head, Walter Parkes, across the conference table, deadpan.

Parkes did not react to the hat, or otherwise laugh. Periodically Ferrell would pretend to fall asleep. No reaction. "Walter sat there with a half smile," recalled McKay. "He didn't know Will that well."

Parkes said, "He was so going-for-the-laugh that I thought the most appropriate thing to do was to pretend he wasn't wearing it."

Ferrell grew up in Orange County, Calif. -- the quintessentially conservative, white, upper-middle-class string of suburbs. In high school he was very popular. He got good grades. He was an athlete, playing basketball, soccer and baseball. He was captain of the basketball team but always liked to pass the ball instead of going for the basket. He's a team player, a generous guy.

He admits, "My wife would say that's why she married me."

None of this, of course, makes any sense. Humor is supposed to come from pain. Comedy is harsh truth seen through a prism of absurdity with a dash of the misanthropic. Isn't it? None of this computes in the life of Will Ferrell.

Judd Apatow, a close friend, comedy writer and sometime collaborator, said: "I have watched him. I have watched his lovely wife. I'm looking for the cracks. I've met his parents. They're very nice people." He added: "The real Will Ferrell is so normal. Other than his comedy, he's uninteresting. In the best possible way."

His colleagues at Saturday Night Live used to muse about this. Ferrell recalls: "Chris Kattan always says to me: `How are you funny? I don't get it.'"